You'll Pay Amazon to Watch Their Commercials (And They Think You'll Like It)

You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination - next stop, the Twilight Zone.

Submitted for your disapproval, the worst of all possible worlds. A world where you pay Amazon an annual or monthly fee for their Prime Video service, and they force-feed you commercials, anyway.

The Seattle-based megaretailer is putting the best possible spin on it, helpfully explaining how "Prime Video ads can help brands connect with audiences through premium streaming content."

Oh, wait — that's a benefit for advertisers, not for Prime members.

Beneficial for viewers or not, the ads started this week.

Amazon's move, while irritating, was almost certainly inevitable. Prime Video was a benefit that cost a lot of money for Amazon to produce and deliver but didn't generate revenues that the company could see. Maybe people signed up for Prime because of Prime Video, maybe not. With ads — or with some members choosing to pay the $3 monthly ransom to avoid ads — Prime Video overnight became a revenue generator.

When Amazon introduced Prime in 2005, it was a simple pitch. For an annual fee of $79, members would enjoy unlimited two-day shipping and overnight shipping on many goods for an extra $2 per item. They emailed me the offer one morning and within maybe 60 seconds, I was a member.

But Amazon kept adding more and more goodies to entice more and more people to sign up for Prime. Adjusted for inflation, the original membership fee would be $126 in today's dollars, but the fee has been jacked up past that to $139.

And then there's that billion-dollar trainwreck Amazon Prime calls "The Rings of Power." Somebody's got to pay for the production of that Tolkein-lite white elephant — and that person is you, dear Prime member.

The result is that you'll either sit through commercials on shows you're already paying real cash money to watch, or your Prime membership fee effectively goes up to $175 a year.

Ouch.

"Inevitable," however, does not mean the same thing as "viewers will like this."

I've had Amazon Prime for more years than I can count, but the $3 a month hike to not have ads played in videos was the last straw. The value offered was already a complete joke compared to what it was in the past, this just made it easy to finally hit that cancel button.
— քǟȶʀɨƈӄ (@DawGoneMetal) January 11, 2024

You'll see sentiments like that one expressed all over social media and elsewhere.

Semi-related, I just canceled all 43 of my Amazon Subscribe & Save items. A missed delivery took me more than an hour to sort out, including incomplete refunds, over the course of two online chats and one phone call.

Now I have to wonder if "free" shipping is worth $139 or maybe even $175 a year. Honestly, I feel like kind of a sucker paying that kind of money while Jezz Bezos dresses like a disco cowboy and dates a woman determined to look like a pr0n star.

Looking back, the American television viewing experience probably peaked shortly after the turn of the century. The downside was that you were likely paying a big monthly fee to your cable company for huge bundles of channels — most of which you likely never watched. But the two big plusses more than outweighed any downsides. Most new shows had made the move to HD and TiVo (or knockoff devices) gave you all the on-demand convenience of streaming plus the ability to skip past commercials.

Back in the Second Golden Age of Television, HBO was happy to take your $12 each month and the only ads you ever saw were promos for next Sunday's new episode of "The Sopranos." And thanks to TiVo, you only had to see the promos if you insisted on watching HBO without the benefit of TiVo — as if you were Amish or something.

But those glory days are gone, never to return, and you and I get to pay for the privilege.